Marvel Rivals dev's transparent, 18-minute breakdown of how ranked isn't rigged fails to placate players who hate losing

To prove to the growing number of players who think Marvel Rivals' ranked mode is rigged or somehow unfair, the official X account dropped a video that reveals a surprising amount of detail about why that's totes not the case.

Lead combat designer Zhiyong spends a packed 18 minutes explaining the math that determines how high you climb based on ranked wins and how the matchmaking system tries to create fair games. The gist is that Marvel Rivals works like a lot of other competitive games, but because there are six-player teams and a roster of wildly different heroes it has to do some guesswork that won't always lead to perfectly balanced matches.

It's true that you might be put on a team with people who aren't as good as you, but the system takes that into account when calculating how much a win or loss is worth. A player who performs much better than their team and still loses won't be punished as hard, for example. But as you go up in ranks, personal performance isn't weighted as heavily in the calculation.

Your individual performance on a hero is compared to every other player on the same hero at the same rank. The system then combines the averages for all your teammates and determines your team's total average skill level. In a match where your team's level is higher than the enemy team's, you'll gain fewer competitive points for winning and drop more points for losing.

The matchmaking system tries to match teams with the closest skill levels and will do its best to pit groups of players against other groups rather than people playing solo. But because of the number of variables with server regions and fluctuating skill levels, the teams are rarely perfectly even.

Anyone who has heard Blizzard talk about Overwatch's ranked system will be familiar with a lot of this. Marvel Rivals isn't very different apart from the fact that it doesn't have a way to queue for a specific role you want to play, which Zhiyong says wouldn't actually fix the problem of unbalanced matches.

However, Zhiyong doesn't address what would happen if Marvel Rivals introduced placement matches to calibrate your skill level up front instead of gradually over time. Many players believe that this would make matches fairer when ranks are reset every season. It sounds like the studio has considered it, according to a reply from executive producer Danny Koo on X where he said he's "on the placement side of things."

There aren't any huge revelations in the video if you're familiar with competitive games. Zhiyong lays out what looks to be a fairly standard system for hero shooters, and he re-confirms that the game doesn't use Engagement Optimized Matchmaking (EOMM) that ignores your skill level and feeds you wins to keep you hooked.

Even with the surprisingly in-depth explanation, not everyone is happy. Such is the curse of competitive games, I guess. There will always be players who believe the system is built to punish you with idiot teammates and loss streaks and not that probability plays a larger role than they'd think. Not that there isn't room for improvement, but assuming there's a way to achieve perfectly balanced matches for every single player is wishful thinking.

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